Community-Based Early Warning Mechanisms to Address Machete Violence in the Artisanal Mining Areas in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This chapter steers the debate towards the adoption of community early warning mechanisms in the efforts to counter the recurring threat of machete violence in the artisanal gold mining areas in Zimbabwe. The community early warning approach has hitherto received less attention and in some instances been overshadowed by the curative approaches desired by the security services. Despite the systemic and political challenges associated with community preventive initiatives, the article argues that local and people-centred approaches present the potential to revolutionise machete violence prevention. Local peacebuilidng actors – police, civil society, local leadership, youth and women – are spurred to develop the early warning systems within the affected communities by mounting tools to detect threats, reduce the impact and mitigate the consequences of the violence. This entails developing preventive systems that are able to assess, monitor, communicate and respond to the machete violence risk in a timely and coordinated manner. The import of the contribution lies not in seeking to prescribe a rigid way in which the community early warning mechanisms must work but to highlight an existential need by bringing to the fore a framework that can guide the next step of bringing affected communities and pracademics (practitioners and academics) to design and operationalise violence prevention in the artisanal gold mining areas in Zimbabwe.

Dr Lawrence Mhandara is a senior lecturer in the Department of Governance and Public Management at the University of Zimbabwe. Email: lmhandara@gmail.com